"NC-IUPHAR" is the Nomenclature and Standards Committee of the International Union of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology. The mission for NC-IUPHAR was initiated in 1987 at the Xth International Congress of Pharmacology. In 1989, the Executive Committee of IUPHAR named Paul Vanhoutte (Hong Kong) as chairman of a revised and enlarged committee. This committee energetically expanded its activities and the number of subcommittees (to 33), eventually producing the first official compendium on the occasion of the XIIIth International Congress of Pharmacology at Munich in 1998. Robert Ruffolo (USA) was Chairman of NC-IUPHAR from 1998-2002. Michael Spedding (France) became Chairman in 2002 and was elected again in 2006 and 2010. This role was taken over in 2015 by Steve Alexander (England) as Michael Spedding moved to hold the post of Secretary-General of IUPHAR.

NC-IUPHAR has the objectives of:

1. Issuing guidelines for the nomenclature and classification of all the (human) biological targets, including all the targets of current and future prescription medicines;
2. Developing an authoritative and freely available, global online resource, the IUPHAR database (https://www.iuphar-db.org), which is now accessible via the Guide to PHARMACOLOGY portal (https://www.guidetopharmacology.org), with a remit to:
   • provide access to data on all known biological targets;
   • enable students and scientists in academia and industry, working in areas related to pharmacology and drug/target research, to exploit the full potential of the considerable amount of information on drug action available in the published literature;
   • provide an entry point into the pharmacological literature for basic and clinical scientists from other disciplines;
   • provide an integrated educational resource with access to high quality training in the principles of basic and clinical pharmacology and techniques;
   • foster innovative drug discovery.

The publications of NC-IUPHAR are published in Pharmacological Reviews and British Journal of Pharmacology. Click here for a full list.

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NC-IUPHAR was formed in 1989 to provide guidance for the nomenclature of receptors and ion channels. Since that time, NC-IUPHAR has conducted twice-yearly combined scientific and business meetings, which took place in Paris, and for a long time received unrestricted educational grants from Servier to support them. In these one-day scientific meetings, we discuss developments across pharmacology and updates to the IUPHAR/BPS Guide to Pharmacology online database, GtoPdb (see below). In general, our meetings have a focussed group of international attendees (typically 20-30) with an over-arching theme for two sessions on the day, combined with a more general ‘current awareness’ session. The format of our meeting is very relaxed, with plenty of time for stimulating discussions.

Thanks to a long-standing relationship with ASPET, NC-IUPHAR has published nomenclature articles in Pharmacological Reviews. Often these are sourced from presentations at meetings of NC-IUPHAR. Since 1992, the 120 reviews published in this journal have accumulated over 50 000 citations (Clarivate Web of Science, August 2025). A more recent link, since 2012, with the BPS has allowed the publication of 41 reviews, not focussed on nomenclature, in the British Journal of Pharmacology with over 3 500 citations. These reviews often coincide with updates to the online database.

Subcommittees

NC-IUPHAR subcommittee membership and a list of database contributors may be found on the Contributors page.